To continue operations amid the ongoing pandemic, media companies of all sizes have had to quickly make the switch to remote production to cater to a fully work-from-home environment.

Production teams are being challenged to adapt to this significant disruption and work in a very agile fashion. They’re having to collaborate on projects remotely, seamlessly share content and assets, quickly roll out different services to different sites and not be as tethered to physical data centers as they once were.

This shift is driving interest in cloud-native technologies and container-based deployments. Platforms such as OpenShift and Kubernetes offer reproducible, high-availability, fault-tolerant infrastructure solutions that allow media businesses to move their workflows to or from any public or private cloud environment without having to rearchitect the infrastructure.

With production teams working remotely, the spotlight has also become more focused on high-quality IP-based streaming and cloud security. It’s now more important than ever for media companies to secure their workflows to protect their content and revenues, meaning media businesses have a lot to think about if they want to operate effectively and efficiently amid the “new normal.”

CONTAINERS TAKE HOLD

Containers are a virtualization technology that enable users to package and isolate discrete application components with the precise dependencies and configurations required to run, thereby providing a streamlined way to build, test, deploy and redeploy applications on multiple environments. This offers many benefits for media organizations. For example, containers provide the flexibility to efficiently manage new remote workflows and infrastructures consistently across all applications, such as encoding, transcoding, graphics rendering and video transport.

Most importantly, they allow businesses to very quickly scale up workflows automatically and on-demand to meet fluctuating requirements and leverage the power of the cloud to apply additional resources when needed. Although there are costs associated, the flexibility means workflows can be scaled up and down to meet spikes or dips in demand for production traffic. Containers are managed by orchestration platforms, most dominantly based on the open source Kubernetes project. 

Another area where containers and their orchestration platforms impact the media industry is availability. Media workflows are highly time sensitive, meaning the availability of services is a key concern for production teams in terms of delivering content to tight deadlines. Kubernetes offers a consistent way to ensure an ultra-high level of availability, while removing the complexity associated with traditional, vendor-specific approaches.

In the past, businesses had to engage with all their technology vendors independently when developing a strategy for high availability. This required additional resources for infrastructure management, as businesses would have to learn the nuances of each product when monitoring for availability. Evolving to a container-based model streamlines and consolidates the monitoring of critical workflow resources, thereby reducing both complexity and cost.

The key for businesses is to make sure that they don’t end up with a bespoke set of tools that’s harder and more complex to manage. This can be avoided by embracing the communities around platforms such as OpenShift. These communities often spearhead new innovations, so staying abreast of the latest trends in the community when building a container-based environment—especially one that comprises different technology vendors and providers—can help guide the process. As a result, businesses will be more likely to adopt a standard toolset that makes it easier to manage the lifecycle of the tools and service in their workflows.

THE FULL PACKAGE

These factors are prompting more and more media businesses to work with external partners to evolve their public cloud resources and workflows into container-based environments. Although the media industry has been relatively slow to adopt containers compared to other sectors, we’re seeing growing interest in Kubernetes and the consolidation of media offerings onto a single platform powered by containers.

But container technology isn’t the only innovation enhancing remote production workflows. IP-based streaming is also taking on a growing importance, particularly in the current climate where remote productions have fewer office-based IT support staff than ever before. Media businesses are operating on skeleton crews, and IP-based streaming offers a flexible and cost-efficient way of operating remote production sites without requiring a full IT staff, while also ensuring a more streamlined workflow.

And linked to this, of course, is the issue of security. As productions continue to become increasingly remote with employees working from different locations, security must be considered as a central part of any end-to-end workflow. Ensuring proper identity management is becoming increasingly important, presenting a need to integrate technologies such as intelligent authentication, credentials encryption and secure key management integration with BYOK (bring your own key) capabilities. 

BYOK enables businesses to easily and cost-efficiently rotate their encryption keys, and can be supplemented with other cloud security innovations such as forensic “watermarking-as-a-service” to counter piracy. This all can help businesses ensure security by following the principles of zero-trust environments when auditing key workflows, providing a high level of control and protecting valuable content in the most effective way possible.

Ultimately, it’s becoming clear that container-based deployments will become the dominant infrastructure solution in a remote and hybrid cloud world. These cloud-native technologies are vital to supporting agile and secure operations, giving media businesses the tools to enhance their remote production workflows and adapt to any situation that comes their way. 

James Wilson is head of Aspera Engineering and Operations, IBM.

It’s no secret that internet content delivery has been on the rise for some time, and although commodity internet has presented plenty of opportunities for broadcasters that need to deliver high-quality content reliably and with negligible delay, it has also led to some challenges.

For example, achieving the right balance between cost-effective streaming and the best-quality viewing experience is easier said than done. Margins are also coming under immense pressure as media enterprises adapt to changing content production workflows and audience acquisition processes.

This explains why building a highly profitable and scalable live media engagement ecosystem is the top business priority for more than two-fifths (41%) of media enterprises over the next 12-18 months, according to a recent Ovum industry survey and report in partnership with IBM Aspera—“Delivering Cost-Effective Premium Live QoS at Scale ‘Anywhere, Everywhere’”

READY FOR CHANGE

The current live streaming environment is in need of change. The world of TV and video services is fragmented and very competitive, so implementing differentiated content strategies is essential in order to achieve average revenue per user and per advertiser (ARPU and ARPA) targets.

This pressure is driving premium content owners to acquire niche media assets. The Ovum report found that 12% of enterprises expect their live content repositories to be worth more than $5 billion by 2023 (up from just 1% in 2018). In terms of specific industries, 19% of social networks, 16% of sports franchises and 14% of digital service providers are planning to hit the $5 billion milestone in three years’ time.

Furthermore, live content is continuing to become a core tool in engaging today’s digital users. This is forcing enterprises to focus on key performance indicators related to economies of scale, such as cutting costs and increasing efficiencies. Reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of premium content delivery via remote production is a leading business objective for 71% of enterprises.

Nearly 80% of enterprises are dissatisfied with their existing live media transport solution deployments. This is primarily because the increasing fragmentation of media consumption between traditional and non-linear models is increasing the cost and inefficiency of traditional content delivery routes. Many current live media transport solutions have poor public network interoperability and lack unified collaboration, testing and visualization capabilities.

Therefore, it’s not surprising to see that IP is currently the fastest emerging delivery route—a trend that will become more prominent in the years to come. 

LOOKING FORWARD

Two key trends are converging to shape the future of live content streaming: increasing cloud adoption and the growing role of agile live media transport over IP networks. 

According to the survey, cloud will emerge as the leading deployment mode by 2023, driven by the need to control costs, streamline media contribution workflows and ensure multigeographical back-ups.

Exclusively cloud live media transport solutions will be the preference for more than a third (34%) of enterprises in three years’ time, in contrast to 2018 when 69% of enterprises preferred an exclusively on-premises deployment model. Additionally, public and private clouds will be the most prominent deployment modes, as highlighted by 82% of enterprises.

However, the cloud adoption curve will vary across premium content-owners. While sports franchises and film studios will be the fastest-emerging segments for cloud offerings, more than half of broadcast TV and video enterprises and digital service providers will maintain their legacy on-premise deployment modes.

Next is the growth of IP networks. Embracing this technology will enable businesses to safeguard profitability and extend the reach of their content by building horizontally and vertically diversified content repositories. Given the level of investment required when acquiring premium live content for tier-1 sports (e.g. the English Premier League, NFL and IPL), this will be vital to maintaining market competitiveness and increasing ROI.

IP networks can also play a key role in enabling premium content owners to improve their long-term operating margins by exponentially increasing the reach of their repositories at the lowest possible TCO. 56% of enterprises believe that single media asset reach can be enhanced by 1-5% using an IP-based cloud live media transport solution, while 37% say it can also reduce workflow TCO by up to 5%. This can equate to a significant long-term cost saving for enterprises. 

FULL STEAM AHEAD

So, what tangible steps can media companies take to cut costs, increase audience engagement rates and lead from the front in today’s marketplace?

First, they must address their live media transport workflows by looking beyond traditional delivery routes. Legacy technologies will simply be unable to support highly scalable TV and video streaming ecosystems, while also failing to cost-efficiently deliver a robust, premium quality of experience to live audiences across multiple screens.

This is where embracing IP networks will make a big difference. For example, it will help provide the cost savings that many enterprises are currently struggling to achieve by reducing their reliance on traditional delivery modes.

Media companies should also look to streamline media contribution by leveraging a unified live media transport workflow. As well as reducing production to distribution TCO (which is currently standing at 32%), this will guarantee premium QoS/QoE with negligible pre buffering, packet loss and round-trip delays.

The final piece of the puzzle involves the adoption of diverse media production workflows (e.g. remote), which will help premium content owners improve both their audience engagement rates and ARPU. When combined with cloud-based live media transport over IP, it will also enhance real-time collaboration, reduce time to market and ensure more efficient media asset management.

With the market more competitive than ever before, following these steps will empower broadcasters and media companies to transform their workflows and spearhead the future of TV and video streaming.

Mike Flathers is CTO of IBM Aspera.

LOS ANGELES—Fox Sports is applying artificial intelligence to the beautiful game of soccer for its coverage of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup, partnering with IBM to boost its statistical analysis and live-streaming capabilities.

New to its broadcast this year, Fox Sports is featuring a segment called Player Spotlight Built with IBM Watson, which uses Watson’s AI capabilities to generate stat analysis on both individual players and teams for match commentary using a natural language interface. The data is gathered from Opta, a data provider that collects and analyzes every pass, goal and penalty kick in near real time. Commentators can then access the data by entering queries into the navigation function, which will then bring up highlights, data and analytics.

Fox Sports is also utilizing the IBM Aspera livestreaming technology for the Women’s World Cup, as it did for 2018’s men’s tournament. With Aspera, editors in Los Angeles have access to HD camera feeds from France within 10 seconds of live play. New to this year’s production is a real-time auto archiving function that allows raw, high-resolution footage to be stored offsite within seconds after matches are completed. Fox Sports estimates that four to six petabytes of content will be streamed throughout the tournament.

The 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup is currently underway in France and will continue through July 7. Team USA’s next game will be on Friday, June 28, at 3 p.m. EST against France.

NEW YORK—While the IT world has embraced software as a service and relied heavily on the cloud for offsite storage, the broadcast world has remained more apprehensive about moving away from on premise hardware and onto cloud-based systems. However, the last several years have seen greater endorsement from the industry vendors in what SaaS can bring to broadcasters, who are now beginning to embrace the model.

“When we launched Media Shuttle, our first SaaS solution, more than five years ago, many in the industry weren’t ready for SaaS,” said Jon Finegold, chief marketing officer for Signiant in Lexington, Mass. “In fact, it was common to hear from top media and entertainment execs that ‘we will never use SaaS.’ Fast forward to 2018, and Media Shuttle has surpassed the 400,000 user mark and is now the de facto standard in the industry for sending and sharing large files. From our lens, the state of SaaS in the industry is very strong.”

‘PAY AS YOU GO’

Mid-2018 could be seen as the transition era where ever more broadcasters and production houses give SaaS another look.

“We’re starting to see broadcasters understanding the need for buying software in different ways,” said Karl Mehring, director of product management for playout at Grass Valley. “The driver is the move from a load of equipment to a ‘pay as you go’ model, and that is something SaaS can provide better than other options out there today.

“This has really been driven by the adoption of the cloud and SaaS in other industries, where there has been a lot of success with it,” Mehring continued. “There will always be challenges with SaaS if you expect it to be same [as legacy broadcast equipment]. But that shouldn’t be a reason to always do the same thing when this technology offers so many benefits.”

‘FAIL FAST’

SaaS can have the added benefit of ensuring that what doesn’t work so well for a company doesn’t mean a large capital expenditure. With SaaS there is the ability to experiment—something usually not possible with onsite hardware.

“The primary advantage of the SaaS model is that the cloud offers the ability to be more dynamic with your business,” said Brick Eksten, CTO for playout and networking at Imagine Communications. “You can try new software with less risk when it comes to upfront costs. If you follow existing IT models of the ‘fail fast,’ then you don’t have to put a lot of expense into it.”

SaaS also allows broadcasters to adjust to ever-changing needs in production. For many businesses SaaS offers scalability and flexibility, which can be important for broadcasters that have variable workflows or are covering a major event, such as the recently concluded World Cup.

“For UHD with typical infrastructure this would be a barrier as you’d need to invest in a lot of hardware that would then go unused 90 percent of the time,” explained Olivier Karra, director for OTT & IPTV solutions at Harmonic. “With SaaS you can optimize your investment in these small windows.”

These small windows could be project-based productions, and it is more than just running remote software; it can offer other advantages that hardware-based solutions don’t so easily provide.

“SaaS allows for a virtual workspace in the cloud, with access data, publishing data and the ability to share metadata as well,” said Tim Claman, CTO and vice president of product management at Avid. “It is also a ‘pay as you go’ solution where multiple users can essentially ‘paint on the same canvas’ at the same time.”

It can also include both storage and compute power during those special projects and events.

“This allows for heavy use for a month or two, where you need a huge scale, but you can downgrade after the event is over,” added Todd Kelly, product marketing director at Aspera, a division of IBM. “What is important for broadcasters is to utilize a platform that will create no latency or bottlenecks when uploading a lot of content to the cloud. You want to make sure you can still run other things on your network, and not have SaaS impact the rest of your transfers or your performance.”

Part of this comes down to understanding how SaaS and the cloud do fit together, but shouldn’t be considered entirely one and the same.

“SaaS is a managed service that can utilize the cloud, and that has created some confusion,” said Karra. “The way we see SaaS as a cloud service can be different from companies that are simply trying to mimic what is running on premise in existing infrastructure.”

COST CONSIDERATIONS

A remaining downside to SaaS is the expense of moving large files to and from the cloud. While it does allow for flexibility and scale, broadcasters utilize far larger files than the IT sector, and as the cloud is geared for the latter, broadcasters may pay a premium in those peak usage times.

“Moving large data to the cloud and back is just very costly, so it is good for storage but moving content back and forth gets very expensive very quickly,” said Ian Fletcher, CTO for media at Grass Valley.

“One of the things you have to consider as a broadcaster using the cloud is what your end distribution model looks like,” added Imagine Communications’ Eksten. “If you are originating content in one country but distributing in another, the satellite costs may justify the transport costs of using the cloud.”

Understanding the costs and transport times with SaaS and the cloud is important, especially for those broadcasters that are only now adopting it.

“Video is very [data] heavy, and businesses that are attuned to IT content need to understand this, and that includes getting the workflows dialed in so that you can see the cloud as a benefit and not something that will slow you down,” said Avid’s Claman.

Then there’s the question of bandwidth.

“For smaller production houses you could hit your file caps,” warned Stan Moote, CTO for the International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers. “That is the one thing everyone has to be careful about. Broadcasters can be savvy about understanding the magnitude of the file size when it comes to transporting it, but there needs to be an understanding of the costs of putting it in storage and getting it back out. This is why some recent statistics show that 40 percent of companies that went into the cloud came back out.”

There may still be some holdouts among broadcasters, but in the short term SaaS may co-exist with legacy systems.

“An important consideration for those looking at SaaS is how it will extend to on-premise operations,” said Shawn Carnahan, CTO of Telestream. “A lot right now is a hybrid. SaaS is increasingly driven by the workflow that often needs to be distributed via the cloud. Some of this may allow broadcasters to better utilize the premise resources or move the extra processing to the cloud.”

For some broadcasters the hardest part may be simply adjusting to SaaS and the cloud, even in this transition period.

“The biggest challenge with SaaS is always finding the 80/20 balance; it comes down to understanding which features and capabilities will add the most value to the most customers so that you can keep the balance of simple and powerful, which is key to a successful SaaS business,” said Signiant’s Finegold. “The media industry is in a very dynamic stage right now so there are always opportunities for new features and new services. The challenge is to focus on the things that matter most to the most customers—a never ending battle in SaaS.”

SIDEBAR: SaaS and Security

One consideration for broadcasters and production houses that are utilizing SaaS along with the cloud for storage is that data isn’t entirely on-premise. This is a legitimate concern given how Sony, HBO and others in the media and entertainment world have had content stolen or leaked. However, security is something all industries should think about regardless of whether SaaS is part of daily operations.

“More and more we’re seeing broadcast production integrated tighter and tighter with IT departments, but more importantly integrating better IT policies,” said Brick Eksten, CTO for playout & networking at Imagine Communications. “We are finally seeing better collaboration here, and while the broadcast world isn’t at the level of banking systems, I’m not really sure it has to be either.”

Taking cybersecurity more seriously is what matters however.

“It is absolutely critical and security hasn’t been taken seriously enough in the industry,” said Ian Fletcher, CTO for media at Grass Valley. “It has actually gone backwards in many ways. We’re used to systems that were disconnected, as for so long we worked on ‘air-gapped’ machines that weren’t connected online. Now with the move to SaaS every system is connected, but at the same time security isn’t always something that you can retrofit into existing infrastructures.”

Added restrictions could of course slow the workflow, especially when many different individuals or teams access the data. However, a cloud with the right security could allow for approved remote access to data and should help broadcasters overcome the barrier of distance.

“We’ve taken the view that regardless of whether it is a private cloud with a data center or the public internet you need the same type of security that you would see if you were doing banking online,” added Fletcher.

Treating data in the broadcast world with the same level of sensitivity as banking or health care is the logical next step.

“SaaS offers the ability to set up the legitimate users for the particular content; as well as their level of permissions where specific control can be granted,” said Todd Kelly, product marketing director at Aspera, a division of IBM. “Broadcasters simply need to organize the content so that they can make sure the right users have the right access. The user access model is the really important part. We’ve seen leaks, but most of it is due to operator error.”

WASHINGTON—Collectively, the growing wave of streaming and OTT versions of linear programs has generated a tidal wave of usage, posing challenges to producers and distributors who are hustling to find ways to create a “consistent experience” for audiences who see programs on a variety of devices and via multiple delivery systems.

According to a Parks Associates analysis last month, 52 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribe to both pay TV and one or more OTT video services. The study also found that about two-thirds of U.S. broadband households subscribe to an OTT service, and 38 percent have more than one OTT subscription.

A separate study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that in North America, 65 percent of viewers watch streaming video once or several times per day—slightly less than the streaming usage in Europe, Asia/Pacific and far less than in South America and the Middle East. And yet another report from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that OTT video revenue will reach nearly $31 billion by 2022, up from about $22 billion this year.

MULTIPLE CHALLENGES

Despite such rosy data, however, the video streaming outlook faces multiple challenges. For example, Dan Rayburn, a principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, frets that the current streaming infrastructure cannot keep pace with the growth in streaming demand. In a recent online blog Rayburn contended that, “if online video consumption continues to take market share from traditional distribution channels and ultimately replaces traditional broadcast distribution, then streaming video infrastructure will need to increase its capacity by over 3x in the coming years.”

Moreover, Rayburn predicts that if 4K UHD replaces the current high-definition signals for streamed content, then “the required bandwidth will increase by a factor of another 4x.

”Adding 8K, used for “true virtual reality” would trigger the need for “another 3x increase in capacity,” Rayburn said in a blog last month. He concluded that such growth scenarios would require a 20-fold increase in the streaming video infrastructure during the coming decade.

“Building 20x the data centers and filling them with 20x the servers in addition to constructing the power plants to power this infrastructure is clearlly not an economically viable or sustainable strategy,” Rayburn added. But his modest conclusion was only that “we need to start talking now about how to meet the “capacity gap” challenge.

WANTED: NEW WORKFLOW TOOLS

That realty—the necessary coexistence of linear and streaming content—has triggered aggressive efforts to empower the media supply chain with new tools to handle workflows for the emerging market.

“Workflows, as repeatable processes, are evolving constantly in reaction to new content manufacturing and distribution scenarios,”said Richard N. Yelen, head of North American Business Development for Accenture Digital Video Products and Services. He cited “the migration from traditional licensed content distribution to ‘app syndication,’ as content owners take greater ownership over the viewing experience.”

“We are increasingly looking at ways of using data [aggregated from consumption platforms, AI-generated from media analysis and other sources] in a highly secured way to drive automation into the supply chain,” Yelen added.

He acknowledged the “distinct differences” between broadcast and cable operator products and services “with obvious intersections” but emphasized that both of those traditional platforms are “quite different” for video on demand and live streaming.

“The difference is between file-based workflow vs. active real-time streaming,” Yelen said. “Live streaming requires more careful/intense real-time management of service continuity and user experience since popular large live events, such as sporting matches, can cause unpredictable viewership spikes.

“These spikes often have load implications across the viewing platform ecosystem, including both core platform services [e.g. user authentication], as well as network and caching [e.g. CDN performance],” Yelen added.

Jon Alexander, senior director of product management for Akamai, noted the special considerations for live vs. on-demand.

“For live and linear delivery, we emphasize live origin capabilities—ingesting video into our network from as close to the origination point [ideally production or playout] as quickly as possible,” Alexander said, noting that for on-demand content, Akamai seeks to move content “into our storage environment or from a customer’s on-premise or cloud storage platform. He emphasized the architecture that seeks to enable “capabilities such as multisource multicast and prepositioning of content.”

The technologies Akamai leverages for OTT video delivery differ from those used for traditional broadcast and cable transmission, according to Alexander.

“The workflows themselves are different, as is encoding and security,” he said. “For OTT, we’re delivering content files in chunks, and we’re using the open, unmanaged internet as the transport layer. While there are changes on the horizon, the majority of OTT delivery today is unicast—one stream to one device—as opposed to one-to-many broadcast delivery.”

But although the underlying technologies are very different, Akamai is working to enable the same experience, he said.

“The bar for consumer expectations has been set by broadcast, so we’re aiming to reach and ultimately exceed those expectations by tuning every layer of the delivery stack from the client and network transport protocols all the way through the application,” he added. “This helps enable efficient video delivery across the internet from the origin to the end-viewer device, whatever or wherever it may be.”

Aspera, an IBM operating unit, has developed a range of streaming video solutions, based on its Fast Adaptive Secure Protocol (FASP), a large data transport protocol that eliminates TCP’s loss and error handling and the resulting erratic transfer rate swings.

“FASPStream enables centralized, real-time production of high bit-rate programming, eliminating the need to colocate costly production staff at remote venues,” Todd Kelly, director of product marketing, explained. “It also supports in-line transcoding, packaging and delivery to accelerate live video delivery and facilitates open file workflows for real-time editing and production. By lowering the production costs for all kinds of events, especially ‘tier 2’ and ‘tier 3’ events, broadcasters can create and deliver new content [that targets] new audiences.”

Kelly also emphasized the value of collaboration, citing his company’s work with Telestream to build a joint solution that integrates FASPStream technology into Telestream’s Vantage and Lightspeed Live software.

“This API-level integration provides a truly innovative approach to delivering live, broadcast-quality video streams from the venue to the remote production facility, enabling workflows never before possible,” Kelly said.

SeaChange International is also focusing on the multiplatform ecosystem with its new “cFlow solutions” portfolio, which debuted in June. According to SeaChange Marketing Vice President Kurt Michel, the solution was developed to serve broadcast, cable and OTT customers who “want a single workflow management system that handles all of the associated workflows.” In addition, SeaChange’s PanoramiC platform, a pre-integrated end-to-end cloud-based video delivery platform, can be used by content producers, broadcasters, cable and mobile operators and aggregators (such as vMVPDs) for multiplatform delivery.

“We have customers who perform over 1,000 quality checks on incoming content, before they even start processing it,” Michel explained. “With adaptive bitrate streaming, their workflows can literally produce dozens of variations of a given title,” including content rights, geo restrictions and other factors.

He characterized SeaChange’s “medium-agnostic” approach as a “cohesive, viewer-centric system” with modular elements that are “medium-specific where technical requirement dictate.”

Michel cited ad insertion technologies that can be adapted to the mechanisms used on different networks.

“Our session management capabilities allow a viewer to stop watching a title on their traditional TV, and pick up where they left off on their smartphone,” he explained.

VIDEO LATENCY & SPORTS SPEEDS

IBM Aspera’s Kelly underscored the importance of low-latency for streamed content.

“Capturing and producing content for live events such as sports, news, training or education programs poses unique challenges, and true real-time, remote production has long been one of the ‘holy grails’ for broadcasters that produce live events,” he said.

The issue of latency in high-speed streaming of sports has become more prominent due to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing sports betting in the U.S., Kelly added.

Akamai’s Alexander agrees that latency is one of the most significant differences between traditional broadcast/cable delivery and OTT systems.

“We’ve done a lot of development to reduce end-to-end latency to 10 seconds on our generally available delivery and live origin products... equivalent to the latency you see on traditional television,” Alexander told TV Technology. “This is especially important for the live sports experience, where you want viewers—no matter how they’re watching—to see a big play at roughly the same time rather than hear cheers or groans or see something on social media before they actually see it live.”

“While 10-second latency is acceptable for most applications, we continue to push for lower latency,” Alexander added. “We have demonstrated two- to three-second end-to-end latency using chunked-transfer encoding, which is being successfully tested with several customers at the moment.”

SeaChange’s Michel also addressed the latency challenges for sports events and other live programming, which he characterized as part of a bigger reality: “workflow complexity is increasing.”

“Real-time content protection [adds]... an additional layer of complexity,” he said. “Viewer tolerance for problems with live sporting events is usually very low, since they are emotionally attached and the content is highly perishable. The live experience is everything.”

He emphasized that providers are not satisfied with an either/or for live video-on-demand.”

“They require both live and VOD,” he said.

PROMISING OUTLOOK

As vendors look toward the next steps in managing conventional and future video delivery, one theme comes through: the need for a consistent experience.

“A consistent experience across viewing devices and platforms” is the objective of SeaChange’s portfolio of content management systems, advertising management and back office systems, explained Kurt Michel, vice president of marketing for the Acton, Mass.-based company.

“Consistency of the viewing experience,” is Akamai’s goal, said Jon Alexander, senior director of product management for Akamai.

“Uniform, unaltered, in-order byte stream that equally supports constant bit rate and adaptive bit rate formats,” according to Todd Kelly director of product marketing for IBM Aspera, in more technical terms.

“Reliable functioning of many large platforms,” is how Accenture’s Yelen summed it up.

“OTT will continue to grow and to dislodge traditional viewing experiences, with mobile traffic growing even further in prominence,” Yelen said. “The rollout of 5G services will be an additional accelerator because it will provide much higher quality and less compressed images when streamed to a device or television. Better connectivity in highly populated urban areas as a result of 5G may also boost consumers’ desire and ability to stream videos.”

Alexander expects to see more mainstream adoption of the HEVC and CMAF [Common Media Application Format] standards for streaming this year.

“We’re still early in the OTT adoption cycle, so consistently meeting performance expectations at 10x or 100x current traffic levels is a major point of emphasis for Akamai,” Alexander said.

Kelly, citing IBM Aspera’s work with Fox Sports on World Cup coverage, pointed out that, waiting for transfers to be complete before editing is “not an option.” He explained that while monitoring the soccer action in Russia, the Fox Sports production team in Los Angeles was “able to create clips while files are still growing,” constantly keeping in mind that delays “would not meet the audience expectation for live viewing.”

Collectively, all that upbeat exuberance seems to justify the forecast of Colin Dixon, chief analyst and founder of nScreenMedia, a Silicon Valley consultancy.

“By 2022, video streaming will scale to TV audience size,” Dixon said in June. “Linear TV broadcasters will be taking advantage of technology to provide fully addressable linear experiences.”

Consistently.

LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) has announced that its 2018 Engineering Excellence Awards will go to Blackmagic Design, Cinnafilm, Canon, IBM Aspera and Telestream, with Samsung receiving an honorable mention. The awards are peer-judged and considered highly competitive.

The HPA Awards Engineering Committee evaluated prospective candidates at a blue ribbon judging session held at IMAX on June 16. Awards will be formally presented at the 13th Annual HPA Awards Gala, set to take place Nov. 15, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

[Read: HPA Panel Examines Road To ATSC 3.0 And Repack]

With the Engineering Excellence award the HPA recognizes the following companies for outstanding technical and creative achievement in media, content production, finishing, distribution and archive:

• Blackmagic Design for DaVinci Resolve 15, a new platform integrating creative and technical tools streamlining tasks from ingest to delivery, while improving quality, functionality, and time to delivery for feature film, episodic TV and short-form productions.

• Canon for Visual and Technical Monitoring of HDR images, including engineering tools for determining exact values of HDR image pixels, comparing SDR and HDR images, utilizing camera metadata, and other key quality control capabilities.

• Cinnafilm Inc. for PixelStrings, a cloud-based video conversion service focused on media playback quality by employing framerate conversion, retiming, artifact/noise/telecine correction, transcoding and other toolsets available on a predictable, platform-as-a-service OpEx model.

• Telestream’s Vantage and Lightspeed Live integrated with Aspera’s FASPStream streaming technology, which enables high-speed capture and production of live, broadcast quality video feeds — and open file workflows — from remote locations for faster production turnaround.

• Samsung for its Samsung Onyx LED technology with DCI certification for cinema and post production, available in 2K resolution 5-meter screen and 4K-resolution 10.3-meter screen models.

“Once again, the Engineering Excellence judging sessions brought us outstanding presentations from a variety of companies at work in different parts of the media and entertainment ecosystem,” said Joachim Zell, chair of the HPA Awards Engineering Committee as well as EFILM’s vice president of technology.

“The presenters are representative of the amazing work that great companies and brilliant individuals are bringing to the marketplace. The judges had a strong field of excellent technologies to evaluate, and the results were extremely close,” Zell added.

In coming weeks, the HPA will announce the recipients of the Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation, among other special awards, as well as recognize excellence in 12 craft categories, including color grading, editing, sound and visual effects.

Tickets for the 13th Annual HPA Awards Gala will be available for purchase later this summer. Visit www.hpaonline.com for more information. The HPA is a partner of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

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